Students School the Oscars in the Art of Special Effects

Quvenzhané Wallis as “Hushpuppy” on the set of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Miles from the glitz of the 85th Academy Awards, a group of university students will be waiting, with crossed fingers, to learn if multiple Oscar-nominee “Beasts of the Southern Wild” wins.

Not just because of an Oscar pool. Thirty-three students from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University worked for months to craft most of the post-production visual-effects for the independent feature.

Staged in a poverty-stricken Louisiana bayou, “Beasts” is up for four Oscars, including Best Picture – a coup for a film made on a shoestring $1.5 million budget, “without name actors and relying on baby pigs to be our monsters,” said the film’s producer Josh Penn.

The fantasy drama, narrated by an imaginative 6-year-old called Hushpuppy (played by Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), was no easy visual feat, encompassing explosions, relentless flooding and stampedes of pig-like creatures called aurochs.

Students worked from 10 to 40 hours a week as part of the academy’s “Compositing in Production” class dubbed Studio 400A, an advanced elective wherein students offer free visual-effects work for low-budget films.

“Finding out about this class was a revelation in an industry geared towards ‘Iron Man 3′ and ‘The Avengers’,” said Mr. Penn. Big-name visual-effects houses didn’t even want to talk to us, he said, let alone offer a price quote. The film was funded by a series of grants from non-profit group Cinereach and the San Francisco Film Society before being picked up by Fox Searchlight for distribution.

“Every filmmaker we work with has no money. We aren’t getting offers to work on ‘Transformers’ and we wouldn’t take them on even if we did,” said Catherine Tate, visual-effects instructor at the academy.

With visual-effects work more frequently being outsourced to China and India, the class creates a rare real-world opportunity for students to work with a lean pipeline of producers and editors.

From enhancing explosions to layering garbage onto surging water, Academy of Art students worked on 85 of 120 shots in “Beasts.”

“I grew up loving movie and never imagined I’d see my work on the big screen, said student compositor Lokesh Prakash.

“A lot of times the students’ work is under the hood so you wouldn’t know it was there, but if they didn’t do it, you would know,” said Ms. Tate, who oversaw the student project.

A handful of students camped out with film producers at a Marin county hotel working 15-hour days in the two-weeks before the film’s premier at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it earned the Grand Jury Prize.

It was “a summer camp of visual effects,” said Mr. Penn. “Actually, more like a pig-summer camp,” he added, referring to the aurochs, the film’s mythical boar-like creatures.

The biggest visual challenge was editing the film’s two-minute finale, where students painstakingly superimposed the aurochs behind Hushpuppy, the young protagonist. In order to maintain the great detail around her wild hair, the students had to edit the shot frame by frame. ”There were some late night jokes about wishing we could braid her hair or cut it,” joked Ryan Bauer, a student compositor. “But, she’s very cute.”

Amid the exhaustion, the student crew became admittedly slaphappy, often breaking into giggles. “[We] would joke around about adding an Angry Bird character that Hushpuppy throws,” said student Anwei Chen, effects-production manager.

Films like “Beasts,” made for less than $2 million, rarely use visual effects. Despite the limited budget, the filmmakers were eager to give the feature a fantastical feel.

The crew innovated, raising baby pigs to star as their monsters. The film’s director, 30-year-old Benh Zietlin, even let the pigs sleep in his bed to make them more comfortable around humans. The filmmakers then dressed the pets in costumes and trained them to do simple tricks, “like running on a treadmill,” said Mr. Penn.

Academy students composited various shots of these costumed pigs into the movie’s final scene when Hushpuppy confronts the aurochs. ”So much of making the movie rested on that final sequence working,” said Penn. If the pigs looked out of place, the scene wouldn’t have had the same emotional resonance, he said.

VFX solider, a visual-effects blog, criticizes tuition-sponsored programs like the academy’s that have students “pay to work for free.” The anonymous blogger, a practicing visual-effects artists, said it takes advantage of students and institutionalizes free labor. “If you’re okay with working for free why would you need overtime, health insurance, retirement benefits,” the blogger said in an interview with WSJ.

He cites the controversial decision by Digital Domain, a visual-effects company, to replace 30% of its paid workforce with tuition-paying Florida State University Students.

Others argue the experience gives students a leg-up in a job market that is tough to crack into. “We are actually giving people a chance to succeed in a competitive business and they are succeeding,” said Ms. Tate.

Students say having “Beasts,” an Oscar nominee, on their reels has made them sizzle, catching the attention of production houses. Team members have landed jobs at place like Dreamworks and other top studios.

“It’s been great to have this on our reels because companies are recognizing it from the attention the film’s gotten,” said student compositor Ryan Bauer.

The success hasn’t stopped with “Beasts.” Students in the academy course also worked on the feature film “Fruitvale” that secured the Grand Jury Prize and Audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The drama was just snapped up by the Weinstein Co. for $2.5 million and is already getting buzz as a contender for next year’s Academy awards.